Global Meat-Eating Is On the Rise, Bringing Surprising Benefits (economist.com) 198
"As Africans get richer, they will eat more meat and live longer, healthier lives," writes the Economist.
PolygamousRanchKid shares their report: In the decade to 2017 global meat consumption rose by an average of 1.9% a year and fresh dairy consumption by 2.1% -- both about twice as fast as population growth. Almost four-fifths of all agricultural land is dedicated to feeding livestock, if you count not just pasture but also cropland used to grow animal feed... It is largely through eating more pork and dairy that Chinese diets have come to resemble Western ones, rich in protein and fat. And it is mostly because their diets have altered that Chinese people have changed shape. The average 12-year-old urban boy was nine centimetres taller in 2010 than in 1985, the average girl seven centimetres taller. Boys in particular have also grown fatter...
The shift from pork to beef in the world's most populous country is bad news for the environment. Because pigs require no pasture, and are efficient at converting feed into flesh, pork is among the greenest of meats. Cattle are usually much less efficient, although they can be farmed in different ways. And because cows are ruminants, they belch methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. A study of American farm data in 2014 estimated that, calorie for calorie, beef production requires three times as much animal feed as pork production and produces almost five times as much greenhouse gases. Other estimates suggest it uses two and a half times as much water...
Sub-Saharan Africans currently have tiny carbon footprints because they use so little energy -- excluding South Africa, the entire continent produces about as much electricity as France. The armies of cattle, goats and sheep will raise Africans' collective contribution to global climate change, though not to near Western or Chinese levels. People will probably become healthier, though. Many African children are stunted (notably small for their age) partly because they do not get enough micronutrients such as Vitamin A. Iron deficiency is startlingly common. In Senegal a health survey in 2017 found that 42% of young children and 14% of women are moderately or severely anaemic. Poor nutrition stunts brains as well as bodies. Animal products are excellent sources of essential vitamins and minerals. Studies in several developing countries have shown that giving milk to schoolchildren makes them taller. Recent research in rural western Kenya found that children who regularly ate eggs grew 5% faster than children who did not; cow's milk had a smaller effect.
A meat industry spokesman from the U.S. Meat Export Federation tells the Economist that "Unlike decades ago, there are no longer large chunks of the population out there that are not yet eating meat."
PolygamousRanchKid shares their report: In the decade to 2017 global meat consumption rose by an average of 1.9% a year and fresh dairy consumption by 2.1% -- both about twice as fast as population growth. Almost four-fifths of all agricultural land is dedicated to feeding livestock, if you count not just pasture but also cropland used to grow animal feed... It is largely through eating more pork and dairy that Chinese diets have come to resemble Western ones, rich in protein and fat. And it is mostly because their diets have altered that Chinese people have changed shape. The average 12-year-old urban boy was nine centimetres taller in 2010 than in 1985, the average girl seven centimetres taller. Boys in particular have also grown fatter...
The shift from pork to beef in the world's most populous country is bad news for the environment. Because pigs require no pasture, and are efficient at converting feed into flesh, pork is among the greenest of meats. Cattle are usually much less efficient, although they can be farmed in different ways. And because cows are ruminants, they belch methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. A study of American farm data in 2014 estimated that, calorie for calorie, beef production requires three times as much animal feed as pork production and produces almost five times as much greenhouse gases. Other estimates suggest it uses two and a half times as much water...
Sub-Saharan Africans currently have tiny carbon footprints because they use so little energy -- excluding South Africa, the entire continent produces about as much electricity as France. The armies of cattle, goats and sheep will raise Africans' collective contribution to global climate change, though not to near Western or Chinese levels. People will probably become healthier, though. Many African children are stunted (notably small for their age) partly because they do not get enough micronutrients such as Vitamin A. Iron deficiency is startlingly common. In Senegal a health survey in 2017 found that 42% of young children and 14% of women are moderately or severely anaemic. Poor nutrition stunts brains as well as bodies. Animal products are excellent sources of essential vitamins and minerals. Studies in several developing countries have shown that giving milk to schoolchildren makes them taller. Recent research in rural western Kenya found that children who regularly ate eggs grew 5% faster than children who did not; cow's milk had a smaller effect.
A meat industry spokesman from the U.S. Meat Export Federation tells the Economist that "Unlike decades ago, there are no longer large chunks of the population out there that are not yet eating meat."
Vegans should become Africans (Score:4, Funny)
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much healthier than vegans
Then maybe the Feed The Children TV ads can stop featuring poor little Kaimbi and show some underfed offspring of hipsters instead.
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Re: Vegans should become Africans (Score:5, Informative)
Except Shao-Lin monks are not vegans by any western definition. They'll happily eat chicken or fish for example. It's red meat as well as specific plants that they don't eat.
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Idiot (Score:1)
Your an idiot. Not even a shill or troll. The mechanisms for meat improving health through nutrition are well understood. B-complex vitamins are fat soluble and synthesized by animals, and are particularly important for brain development as well as growth, and require some fat in the diet to be absorbed or synthesized. As diets are improved from extreme poverty, almost exclusively taro root, for example, to including meats, health outcomes improve amazingly.
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Somebody posted incorrect information on the Internet so I am required to correct it.
https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/hn-2922005 [uofmhealth.org]
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The real attribution is to economic freedom, just as happened in the west in the industrial revolution.
But neither meat nor economic freedom (even with all its bumps and warts) sit well with some political persuasions.
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And for the millions of Asians and Africans starved to death for the profit of the few, it is a disaster.
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Facts always make the right quiver
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All were born and have lived meat-free
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They also might eat red meat if it is leftovers that would otherwise go to waste.
I don't attend the Shao-Lin temple, but the monks at the temple I go to end up eating a lot of "leftovers" that people bring to share.
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Some Shaolin do this, and some don't. So the Shaolin were not the best example that the above poster could have given, but the point about getting enough micro and macro nutrients is still valid.
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IMHO the question to end this debate is: What diet did Kwai Chang Caine follow?
Eating cows better for the environment (Score:5, Funny)
Contrary to the summary, the more people that eat fart-generating-cows, the better off everyone is.
Don't believe me? India, which worships cows and refuses to eat the fart-emitting monsters, is very high [scidev.net] on the countries contributing to climate change.
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It's difficult to say since younger ones are also raised, so the number is roughly some constant. Also some of them aren't killed for years for milking.
You know how I can tell you have never set foot on a farm? Breeds of cows are divided into milk cows and meat cows. The milk cows are never killed unless its to save them from suffering a disease which is already terminal. Meat cows are killed at a specific time after their birth.
Of all the topics that hipsters talk about, Agriculture is probably the one they are most consistently wrong about. I've seriously heard a vegan drone on about ag for an hour without ever saying anything remotely resembling a
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And what happens the male offspring of the milking varieties?
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Shhhhhhhhh. We don't want to upset the farmers.
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You know how I can tell you have never set foot on a farm? Breeds of cows are divided into milk cows and meat cows. The milk cows are never killed unless its to save them from suffering a disease which is already terminal. Meat cows are killed at a specific time after their birth.
What was principally wrong in the sentence "Also some of them aren't killed for years for milking"? This didn't imply that there are no specialized breeds of cows, some of the cows are for meat, some are kept for milk, whether they're specialized breeds or not, doesn't matter. Cows produce methane in any case and the emissions are roughly proportional to the number of live cows. So the solution isn't in eating more cows, but in reducing cow breeding.
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Are you silly? This would be true if we eat the cows to extinction, but not if we keep and breed them to eat them then and to breed and keep more of them. It just doesn't help one bit if you eat one cow and then raise another one to eat it later and so on. This will net you one eternal cow that farts methane all the time. Eating them and not breeding new ones (and then not having any cows to eat anymore) would help, yes.
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:1)
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One problem with your bovine-population-control logic: excluding the religious whackos in India, there would be far fewer cattle in existence - perhaps to the extinction-level number zero - if humans hadn't domesticated them and become reliant upon them for food and other materials. So, simply not finding them useful is an even better way to control the population than eating them.
Re:Eating cows better for the environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Grown on land which cannot be used for grain because it is unsuitable for machinery, or
Grown on land as part of crop rotation - the animals fertilise the land ready for the next crop as part of a four or five year cycle - so the land has successfully remained in continuous use for hundreds of years.
There is no alternative use for most of this land, and the cows are primarily grown for milk, the vast majority of bulls, and excess cows, being sent for slaughter and eaten. I assume most of Europe is similar.
In winter, the cows are fed with hay made from the stalks of the grain crops (not otherwise useful). We no longer make thatched roofs with it - we have very few thatched roofs, and reeds make better thatch.
AFAICT, in West Africa, cows are, as they always have been, like their owners, nomadic, and fertilise land used for other crops at other times, and there is no winter. I believe East Africa is similar, but I have not been there.
I have no experience of the Americas (other than seeing them on TV).
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:2)
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Vast swaths of the US used for cattle production are absolutely useless for any sort of grain crop.
That would work (Score:2)
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Now I may be a city slicker, but I'm fairly certain cattle don't breed at all after you eat them.
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Someone begs to differ [absglobal.com]
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YOu lose
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We (Hindus) don't worship cows as much refuse to partake meat of the animal whose milk we drink.
We treat the animal lovingly as a mother.
Jews have a similar concept in that they don't cook veal in milk, it's emotional, you may not understand.
Cows are like dogs in American society.
I speak this as an American Indian who has lived in the USA since 2000 and used to love the Big Mac and gave it up when I saw what it was doing to my health.
\\// Peace, Live long and Prosper.
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It wasn't the beef in the Big Mac that hurt your health, it was the bread and condiments. If you only ate the burger patty and cheese, you'd be so much better off.
The Jewish prohibition on mixing meat and dairy comes from a specific verse in the Pentateuch which forbids boiling a goat kid in its mother's milk.
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:2)
Well, its not just physical health but mental and spiritual wellbeing.
Ancient Hindu/Yogic texts 5000 years old and their philosophical arguments on the Law of Karma and Reincarnation up the evolutionary food chain and the Karmic consequences (physical, and mental) of causing undue pain to living beings when other means of nutrition are plenty available seem pretty obvious to me in retrospect, having reduced my meat intake.
To each his/her own, however...Hinduism has never been about imposing ones beliefs up
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My mental and spiritual well being, along with my physical well being, have dramatically improved since I eliminated plants, especially grains, from my diet, and turned to almost exclusively eating meat.
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:2)
Atkins did work for me at one point in my life as well...whatever works.
\\// Spock out.
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Off topic, but "American Indian" generally is used to refer to the tribes native to the Americas such as the Crow, Blackfeet, Navajo, and Apache.
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:2)
Well, less beer for me tomorrow.
Re: Eating cows better for the environment (Score:2)
I said above, less beer for me tomorrow...well yesterday now.
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... India, ...is very high [scidev.net] on the countries contributing to climate change.
It's called "Coal"
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Did your mother have any children that lived?
Sir, she has only had children who have LIVED.
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Did your mother have any children that lived?
Sir, she has only had children who have LIVED.
That explains it.
The stork that brought you to the world ought to be arrested!
Other "benefit" (Score:5, Interesting)
And it is mostly because their diets have altered that Chinese people have changed shape. The average 12-year-old urban boy was nine centimetres taller in 2010 than in 1985, the average girl seven centimetres taller. Boys in particular have also grown fatter...
Women cup sizes have also increased.
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Except that one of the key factors depressing IQ in African states compared to rest of the world was the fact that they were late in elimination child starvation. That is the most important historic part of human IQ not getting expressed to its full genealogically possible extent.
Give it two more generations and we'll start seeing if all the whining about IQ and race in relation to various African ethnicities actually has merit, and if Africans will end up like East Asians. The smartest people on the planet
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And meanwhile, Nigerians are crushing it worldwide. Not to even talk about "the vermin who's stupidity is poisoning the gene pool" Jews, as went the mythos by your predecessors, being literally the smartest ethnic group on the planet by a clear margin.
Funny how imagination vs reality works.
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You clearly don't understand the root causes of Yellow Fever.
Some curious numbers (Score:5, Funny)
Of all the mammals on the planet by mass (as a rough measure of ecological footprint) about 30% are humans, 65% are the animals (of a few species) we keep to eat them. The remaining 5% are wild animals.
If anyone still thinks the world is just "nature" with humanity a part of it, it's actually pretty much the opposite of that: The world is a badly managed farm, with "nature" being the weeds along the ditches.
Re:Some curious numbers (Score:4, Funny)
You're just a confused mammal supremacist.
The dominant life forms are insects. Earth is mostly a giant ant farm. So you're right about the farm part.
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Why just mammals? (Score:5, Interesting)
450 Gigatons of carbon - plants
70 Gigatons - bacteria
12 Gigatons - fungi
4 Gigatons - protists
1 Gigatons - arthropods
0.7 Gigatons - fish
0.2 Gigatons - viruses
0.2 Gigatons - molluscs
0.1 Gigatons - cnidarians (jellyfish)
0.1 Gigatons - livestock
0.06 Gigatons - humans
0.007 Gigatons - wild mammals
Certainly, humans have a disproportionately huge (maybe even predominant) impact on the planet's ecosystem. But in terms of mass of life on earth, humans are roundoff error. (link to paper the diagram came from [pnas.org])
U.S. Meat Export Federation tells the Economist (Score:2, Insightful)
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Careful what you wish for. If you were to get actual education, rather than science denial common in vegan circles, you'd quickly find out that one of the key aspects of uplifting people out of poverty throughout human history involved increasing their intake of meat in a dramatic fashion.
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This story was posted after the Beyond Meat story. (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is a interesting coincidence.
Admins have a saved search for "meat" stories.
Interesting dilemma (Score:5, Insightful)
Meat production / consumption provides an interesting dilemma for humanity going forward. On one hand, a diet that includes meat is typically much more complete in terms of nutrition. No one who eats a properly balanced diet that includes meat needs to take synthetic vitamins to make up for dietary deficiencies. On the other hand, calorie for calorie, meat product is an incredibly unproductive means of producing basic sustenance in a world that is become increasingly resource scarce.
Personally, I think western society needs to get over their dumb-shit distaste over eating insects and also need to get over the fact that someday their steaks might come from a lab rather than a slaughterhouse. Both issues are purely personal bias and have nothing to do with sound reasoning. A while ago I had the opportunity to have a meal worm taco ( none of our conventionally farmed animals are native to the Americas so denser populations like in central America had to find other easy sources of animal protein ) and it was fucking delicious. The fried meal worms had a very nice mildly nutty flavor to them and a really nice crunchy chew.
Re: Interesting dilemma (Score:2, Informative)
Manchester, Northwest England. There's a vitamin D deficiency epidemic, not due to dietary reasons though but due to the fact it rains every bloody day. No amount of dietary changes will fix it.
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You can get all the vitamin D you need from oily cold water fish. Fish oil is a great source of it.
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Fake meat is a solution looking for a problem (Score:2, Interesting)
First of all, unless your religion or culture frown upon eating meat, you either dislike meat or like the image of not b
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It's like you've buried your head in the sand and made yourself willfully ignorant on this subject.
The issue for those of us who eat meat (and which I made perfectly clear in my initial post) is that meat production is a massively inefficient means of food production and is not sustainable in its current context given the rising affluence of the third world. If you're around my age (40) or older then you've already seen massive price increases for both beef and seafood in the context of our increasingly glo
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Kids...
FYI, retail beef prices are running just about at the rate of inflation over the last half century. Wholesale prices of beef have fallen when adjusted for inflation....
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Jackasses...
Beef's price inflation has been on average .26% higher than general inflation http://www.in2013dollars.com/B... [in2013dollars.com] . Compound that annually and it starts to add up.
Or how about on a more recent time scale? In the last twenty years beef prices have been increasing at a rate 1.86% higher than inflation http://www.in2013dollars.com/B... [in2013dollars.com] . This means that since 2000 the price of beef has more than doubled.
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This feels like a narrow sample size so I wanted to add a another data point in response.
Most vegetarians or vegans I know in the UK choose to be so due to the same reasoning you aspire to... reduction of their carbon footprint.
And because of the increased levels of cruelty associated with industrial farming practices.
The percentage who don't like the taste or the idea of killing an animal is relatively minor.
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Most vegetarians or vegans I know in the UK choose to be so due to the same reasoning you aspire to... reduction of their carbon footprint.
And because of the increased levels of cruelty associated with industrial farming practices.
The percentage who don't like the taste or the idea of killing an animal is relatively minor.
Come on...really?....really?....do you truly believe that in your heart of hearts?
Maybe you're right. I've only met the people from the UK who come to America and a few when I travel there, but I have never lived there.
So the only thing keeping you from eating a giant cheeseburger is that it came from an animal?...so you'd go carnivore just like the rest of us if it was cruelty free (like grown in a lab) and had the same carbon footprint as a pound of tofu? I would be very surprised if the answer wa
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Let me clarify the sacred cow notion.
We (Hindus) don't worship cows as much refuse to partake meat of the animal whose milk we drink.
We treat the animal lovingly as a mother.
Jews have a similar concept in that they don't cook veal in milk, it's emotional, you may not understand.
Cows are like dogs in American society.
I speak this as an American Indian who has lived in the USA since 2000 and used to love the Big Mac and gave it up when I saw what it was doing to my health.
\\// Peace, Live long and Prosper.
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Modern science has yet to be able to quantify the benefits of not eating meat.
A combined analysis of data from five prospective studies involving more than 76,000 participants showed that vegetarians were, on average, 25% less likely to die of heart disease.
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I think eating insects will be a hard sell. Lab grown meat and not-meat like the Impossible Burger seem like more practical alternatives.
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Maybe yes and maybe no.
Based off my own personal experience I firmly believe that, in a modern context, if you took your typical meat eater and forced them to slaughter their meat prior to consuming it you would very quickly find a lot of vegetarians.That opinion is not at all scientific and certainly doesnt hold true to myself but I really do think there's some real truth there.
Given that, what then is the problem with eating insects? It's purely perception and can be spun many ways. Cows are actually kind
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I think eating insects will be a hard sell.
Can be done. We already eat their arthropod relatives from the ocean.
Lobsters are just giant cockroaches, crawling on the sea floor and eating garbage, hiding under rocks when the light is on.
And worse: if people will eat raw oysters, they'll eat anything.
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Lobsters are just giant cockroaches, crawling on the sea floor and eating garbage, hiding under rocks when the light is on.
As someone who can't stand lobster, I look forward to pointing this out the next time someone suggests it on a trip to Maine or Boston...
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Flavorless? It's perfectly fine to not like lobster but don't just make things up. Lobster has a very rich flavor.
Of course pallets do differ but you're literally the first person I've heard claim that the meat has no flavor.
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Nobody who eats a properly balanced diet that excludes meat needs to take synthetic vitamins to make up for dietary deficiencies either. You can get all of your required nutrients from plants, you just have to be slightly more careful about what you eat.
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Here's the first google hit of what you can't get get (or not easily get at least) from plants. https://www.healthline.com/nut... [healthline.com]
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The question, "What is the minimal amount of suffering we can inflict on fellow beings in order to nutritionally sustain the human species?" is an important one, with a number of complex, interlocking answers.
Oh, with organic farming, we spray copper sulfate on stuff and it soaks into the ground and destroys worms and such. We roll over the land and destroy the homes of mice and rabbits and all that, smash lots of insects, basically destroy and kill and maim as we go.
The same is true of regular farming and meat production, except when you're eating a steak you know there was once a cow.
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Personally, I think western society needs to get over their dumb-shit distaste over eating insects and also need to get over the fact that someday their steaks might come from a lab rather than a slaughterhouse.
Allow me to propose a more modest intermediate step, where we substitute goats for cows. They don't produce so much methane, and they can eat a broader variety of feed than can cows. They can actually be useful for clearing flammable brush... They're natures rakes!
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I think that this argument gives far too much cover for the typical western diet. The dietary benefits of meat consumption do not require eating meat in 2-3 meals per day, nor the resource intensity and nauseating awfulness of industrial meat production. And yet, that is supposedly th
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"I think that this argument gives far too much cover for the typical western diet. The dietary benefits of meat consumption do not require eating meat in 2-3 meals per day, nor the resource intensity and nauseating awfulness of industrial meat production."
I agree to a certain extent. We definitely do not need to eat meat as often as we do and meat production, as I stated before, is certainly inefficient.
"And yet, that is supposedly the norm, and what the rest of the world aspires to."
Meat is very vitamin de
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Sigh... maybe you didn't read the conversation string?
Comment above mine: "I think that this argument gives far too much cover for the typical western diet..." and that was in response to part of my own post above that which mentions western consumption of meat.
I don't think anyone needs to be informed that poor third worlder's eat a poverty level diet that includes virtually no meat and if they do they're so shockingly ignorant they're probably not worth talking to.
Vitamin A deficiency (Score:2)
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pork is among the greenest of meats (Score:1)
pork is among the greenest of meats
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.
Cows and methane (Score:5, Interesting)
The oft repeated cows are contributing to global warming is not entirely true.
First, methane has a life span of 10 years. So any new source of methane (e.g. a dairy farm) will not be adding any more methane to the atmosphere after 10 years. Whatever new methane it contributes, will just replace the old portion that is broken down.
Second, beef and dairy in the USA only contributes a total of 4% greenhouse gas emissions.
Fossil fuel is where the bulk of greenhouse gas comes from, about 2/3rd of US total (transportation and energy production), and we have been releasing carbon that was sequestered for millions of years in just 200 years.
Even going vegan for a whole year amounts to just half your share of a single trans-Atlantic flight.
Details and link in Cows and Climate Change: A Closer Look [www.cbc.ca].
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The Closer Look article you posted makes a reference to how grassland is a useful carbon storage and therefore a positive thing. I think this may be only a small part of the story.
The way I understood it, the criticism of this sort of agriculture and its relationship with climate change is that more beef production requires more land to be used for cows and converted from [something else] to pasture. This usually works by burning forests, removing old forest and replacing with what the producers consider mo
you don't win friends with salad! (Score:2)
you don't win friends with salad!
Pork - greenest of meats? (Score:2)
I thought pork was “the other white meat”. No way I’m gonna be caught eating green meat, no sirree bob.
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Misleading Data (Score:3)
This is meant to say that we need three times as much farmed land to raise a cow as a pig (calorie for calorie). But the summary points out that fallacy:
Pigs must be given food--much of which must be grown on arable land (this could be significantly reduced if various laws allowed food waste to be given (or sold) to hog farmers for "slop"). Beef cattle, on the other hand, graze. 2.1 million head of cattle graze on land owned by the US Bureau of Land Management and the US Forestry Service (Citation (pdf) [dailypitchfork.org]). This isn't land that could be farmed.
Another 634 million acres of private land (in the Lower 48) is grazing land (Citation [usda.gov]) (much of it land that can't be farmed for crops, or which would cause problems if cultivated).
The data also focuses only on food--which is only one way in which we benefit from cows. Here's a few others [wordpress.com].
We also get a lot of similar products from pigs. But a pigs are quite a bit smaller than cows, so you have to look at total resources per kilo (and their values, both monetary and otherwise) to make an accurate assessment of where the better investment of resources is.
Pork is NOT green (Score:5, Insightful)
Because pigs require no pasture, and are efficient at converting feed into flesh, pork is among the greenest of meats.
They should have said, "among the greenest of RED meats". (I know, how can it be red and green at the same time? But anyway.) Pork uses a lot less energy than beef, but chicken uses a lot less than pork [theoildrum.com]. As a rule, poultry and fish are much more efficient to produce than red meat.
Unspoken connotation (Score:1)
This article brings up one of the rarely discussed pieces of climate change. Is it right to ask sub-saharan African countries to forgo quality of life improvements because they contribute to climate change?
It must be true! (Score:2)
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What you typed....it really makes no sense. If you want to attack a political position, then maybe starting with the actual goals and methods would be a good approach.
As it stands you just sound like someone who makes up for ignorance through volume.
Re: Fake beef. (Score:2)
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It's a current fad among foodies in much of Western world. You'll find similar projects by the dozens in various Western and Northern European nations. It's a part of foodie culture, people for whom food is a fashion statement.